There has been much discussion about AI recently, and various governments are banning certain services. Recently there have been a series of Deepseek bans in various countries. The method is to either ban users from using the service, such as Australian federal employees, or remove the app from the relevant store, as Italy has done.

Example: https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/us-congress-bans-deepseek-ai-security-risks-125020101088_1.html

https://www.silicon.co.uk/cloud/ai/italy-blocks-deepseek-over-data-concernsdeepseek-italy-block-597854

Removing the app from the relevant store is not a foolproof method. When TikTok was banned, devices with the previously installed app were traded online for huge costs, way above the normal value because the app was still present, and the service could be accessed. Secure64 LineGuard deployed in a network would have stopped these devices from accessing TikTok while the ban was in place.

Firewall vendors also suggest that businesses block access by blocking the domain. This is a good idea, but what happens when the AI vendor changes the domain? What happens when the user is off the corporate network on open Wi-Fi? 

Using a firewall is not a long-term solution as it doesn’t scale, impacts performance, and critically doesn’t solve the off-net issue.

While manually changing firewall rules is possible, it requires a lot of work by the system administrator, and if you have multiple firewalls, you might have to perform the change multiple times.

Secure64 with LineGuard has a cloud-based solution that operates across the globe. We can block Deepseek and many other apps and content. To enable instant blocking, click a radio button for the app or category. With our client app, we can ensure that the app is blocked even when users are off the network. This simple app is always on and can only be turned off with a PIN or the admin’s approval. With the always up-to-date feeds, if the domains change, we block the new domains.

This lessens the overhead for network admins, as you just have to click the box to block the app. You can also select a whole category, such as Social Media, Firearms, Alcohol, malware, phishing, Ransomware, etc.

LineGuard is a content control platform. You select the category to block, such as AI, and we block all the ones we recognize. If new ones appear, we add them to the category or app list.

Interestingly, we use our own AI to detect and categorize new sites, reducing the time it takes for a service to appear blocked. This process is rapid and offers protection quickly. LineGuard AI blocking includes multiple AI engines, including Deepseek and ChatGPT, and is available now.

To learn more about Secure64 LineGuard, contact sales@secure64.com

The Dark Side of the Web:

Why Controlling Kids’ Online Access Matters

In an increasingly digital world, the internet has become an integral part of childhood, offering limitless opportunities for education, entertainment, and social connection. Yet, beneath its surface lies a host of potential dangers that can profoundly impact young minds. From harmful content and cyberbullying to addiction and privacy risks, the internet can expose children to challenges they are not equipped to handle alone. This raises critical questions about the necessity of controlling children’s access to the web. What are the most pressing reasons for monitoring their online activity? Which types of content are particularly damaging to their mental, emotional, and physical well-being? And how are governments around the world stepping up to regulate children’s internet access? In this blog I’ll be exploring these pressing questions, shedding light on the risks of unregulated access and the global strides being made to create a safer digital environment for the next generation.

What are the key reasons for controlling children’s internet access?

Controlling children’s access to the internet is essential to protect their development and well-being. While the internet offers vast educational resources and creative opportunities, it also exposes children to risks that can harm their mental, emotional, and physical health. Exposure to inappropriate content, such as violent or explicit material, can lead to anxiety, distorted worldviews, or premature awareness of adult themes. Additionally, misinformation and fake news can mislead young minds, disrupting their understanding and learning.

Cyberbullying is a significant online threat. Social media platforms and messaging apps can become spaces for harassment, leaving children vulnerable to emotional distress, low self-esteem, and even depression. Similarly, the risk of online predators exploiting children through manipulation or grooming highlights the importance of supervision in digital spaces.

Excessive screen time presents its own challenges, including addiction, disrupted sleep, and reduced physical activity. Platforms like gaming and social media are designed to maximize engagement, making it difficult for children to regulate their usage effectively.

Parental controls and boundaries are crucial in creating a safer online environment. By monitoring activity and teaching responsible online behavior, caregivers can help children navigate the internet without falling prey to its darker aspects. Open communication about their online experiences empowers children to make safer choices while benefiting from the internet’s vast potential.

What are the most prominent forms of damaging content for children?

The internet is a treasure trove of information and entertainment, but it also harbours damaging content that can significantly impact children’s well-being. One of the most concerning forms is explicit material, including pornography and graphic violence. These can distort a child’s understanding of relationships, desensitize them to violence, or instil fear and anxiety. Hate speech and discriminatory content are also harmful, as they expose children to toxic ideologies that can influence their developing perspectives on society and relationships.

Another major concern is self-harm and pro-eating disorder content, often disguised as motivational or community support posts. Such material can exacerbate mental health struggles, leading vulnerable children down dangerous paths. Similarly, viral dangerous challenges on social media—such as choking games or stunts—pose significant physical risks, with some leading to severe injury or death.

Cyberbullying, often enabled by anonymity online, is another widespread issue. Hurtful messages, public shaming, and exclusion can severely impact a child’s self-esteem, mental health, and social development. Additionally, misinformation targeting children, such as fake health tips or conspiracy theories, can mislead their understanding of the world and erode trust in reliable sources.

Addictive content, including social media algorithms and endless video streams, can harm children by fostering dependency, reducing physical activity, and disrupting sleep patterns. Lastly, online predators exploit forums and chat rooms to groom children, posing serious threats to their safety.

These forms of damaging content highlight the need for robust parental controls, digital literacy education, and ongoing conversations to help children safely navigate the online world.

Global Approaches to Regulating Children’s Internet Access

Countries around the world are recognizing the urgent need to regulate children’s access to the internet to protect them from harmful content, cyberbullying, and online exploitation.

Australia has recently taken the global headlines, passing a bill in November 2024 to legislate against under-16’s using or creating social media accounts. This becomes law in November 2025 with social media companies then having responsibility to enforce the rules or face fines up to $50Million.

China has been regulating the internet since 1996, but since 2021 it has implemented many strict controls on children’s internet use. This includes limiting screen time for online gaming to just three hours per week, daily smart device access limits of 40 minutes, for under 8’s, and 60 minutes for over 8’s. Research has shown a 96% drop in gaming hours over 3 years.

The European Union has introduced initiatives like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which includes specific provisions to safeguard children’s data online. Individual EU countries, such as France and Germany, have also implemented stricter content moderation laws to limit access to harmful material and enhance online safety for younger users.

The United Kingdom enacted the Online Safety Bill, which places a duty of care on social media companies and other platforms to protect children from harmful content like pornography, cyberbullying, and grooming. Platforms failing to comply face significant fines and potential bans.

In the United States, the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) requires websites to obtain parental consent before collecting data from users under 13. States like California are advancing additional child- specific data privacy laws.

Many emerging countries, such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan havefocused on digital literacy campaigns and enhancing parental controls. Meanwhile, nations such as South Korea have implemented gaming curfews and monitoring tools to address online addiction.

These global efforts reflect growing awareness of the need to balance internet access with robust protections for young users.

A final thought…

In conclusion, the internet offers immense opportunities for learning and growth, but it also exposes children to significant risks that require proactive management. From harmful content and cyberbullying to excessive screen time and online predators, the challenges of unregulated access are clear. Countries worldwide are stepping up to address these concerns through regulatory measures, digital literacy initiatives, and enhanced parental controls. However, safeguarding children online is a shared responsibility that involves governments, educators, parents, and tech companies working together. By fostering safer digital environments and teaching responsible internet use, we can ensure children benefit from the internet’s potential without unnecessary harm.

About Secure64

Secure64 brings control to the internet through content filtering and malware blocking. Our technologies are widely deployed and protect over 1.2billion users globally.

Author
Will Brebner is an independent writer on internet safety and is currently studying Biomedicine at Manchester University, UK

DNS, unfortunately, is a prime target for DDoS attacks, a fact that cannot be ignored. This vulnerability poses a significant risk to the stability and accessibility of your online services.

Some servers and some setups allow the bad guys to use DNS servers to attack other servers. Other setups and servers are not configured or cannot protect against inbound attacks.

Why protect a DNS server?

No DNS = No Internet. It’s that simple, as no one knows the IP address for a server. Think of the sites you use every day, and ask yourself if you know the IPv4 address and then ask if you could remember the IPv6 address.

This means you have 2 different areas to protect

1. Protect your brand by keeping the Authorative DNS operational
2. Protect you caching DNS and ensuring it is not open for abuse internally or externally

Protecting your brand

Consider the scenario where a customer or a user is trying to access your website. They initiate a DNS lookup, which at some point involves your server. If your DNS server is down or overloaded due to a DDoS attack, the user cannot retrieve the IP address for the service they need. Hackers exploit this vulnerability, effectively blocking access to your service without even compromising your server. This underscores the urgency of protecting your DNS server.

This problem can cause financial issues and result in users accessing alternate providers to get the desired product or service.

Authoritative DNS servers need the ability to dynamically block these attacks without having to resort to the system administrator configuring the prevention at the time of the attack. These servers need the ability to report on the attack so that lessons can be learned, but the most obvious feature is uptime; they have to resolve legitimate queries while blocking the attack.

Protection needs to be built into the whole software stack. Using external platforms to protect insecure DNS servers is a bad idea as the system administrator cannot easily see the whole picture of the attack. The DNS solution in your network needs to be aware of the attack and protect itself.

Protecting the caching DNS server

There are far more caching DNS servers installed across the internet and inside networks than Authorative DNS servers. Sometimes, hackers abuse caching DNS servers into a DDoS cluster. If a DNS server is open as a resolver on the internet, the hacker can bounce malicious queries off it and hide their location and intention. This can be a massive problem on the internet.

Again, filtering needs to be deployed to protect the DNS server and ensure your servers are not used for malicious reasons.

Start low in the stack

DNS Software sits at the top of the ISO stack. Hackers know this and often attack the server with ICMP, TCP and UDP attacks which are nothing to do with DNS. Your protection, therefore, needs to secure the server against attacks from the lower layers of the stack, and critically, it needs to be able to report these attacks. An important factor is having all the various attacks correlated in the protection and reporting architecture and visible using a GUI. This ensures the system administrator doesn’t have to dig through logs and reports from different protection platforms where they cannot understand all the attack vector.

Visibility

Having a GUI that can see the attacks in near real-time is a factor to help understand when you are being attacked, how you are being attacked and how the attack changes over time.

If you have your protection split across different vendors and different protection boxes, seeing the ICMP and DNS attacks is often very hard as you may have multiple different reporting engines to view and try and correlate the data.

The reporting engine needs to work offline from the servers to ensure that it doesn’t impact the performance of the solution, but critically, you need real-time information to see the attack. Some platforms have large delays in reporting of minutes, and that doesn’t help when the attack could be over in the time taken to see the data.

Protect against misuse of the DNS

DNS Tunnelling is a clever technique that uses perfectly valid DNS queries from sources allowed to query the caching DNS server. Hackers embed the traffic they want to pass in a DNS query and response. The caching DNS server sends the packet to the Internet. Hackers can use this technique for service theft and data exfiltration. As the data is, in effect, valid, legacy solutions do nothing to stop this method.

DNS tunnelling protection has to be dynamic and not rely on lists of domains from a central source. The platform must be self-protecting and provide detailed reporting.

FORT COLLINS, COLO. (PRWEB) MAY 03, 2023

Secure64 Software Corporation, creators of purpose-built security and DNS solutions, announced today the launch of Secure64 CloudDNS™, a first-of-its-kind, cloud-native solution that delivers carrier-grade DNS utilising open Container-as-a-Service (CaaS) technologies and Kubernetes. CloudDNS is suitable for wireline and Wireless 3G/4G/5G services, allowing fast, reliable, scalable deployments.

As carriers modernize and upgrade their infrastructure, they often use applications from different vendors, each application having its unique approach to configuration, deployment, monitoring, scaling, and management. The result is that carriers incur additional operational costs and experience resource constraints as network teams must develop expertise in each of these disparate applications.

By utilizing modern cloud solutions, carriers can deploy within a shared framework to accelerate deployment, simplify configuration changes, and maximize hardware utilization. These solutions also provide functionality allowing automated scale-up or sale-down as required using rules based on load and performance.

“Our customers require automated delivery of DNS services in a cloud-native environment,” says Ian Sampson, Chief Marketing Officer of Secure64. “We have responded to this need and developed the ability to deliver our existing solutions in a Kubernetes or container environment with management and reporting using standardized tools.”

Secure64 CloudDNS™, with the power of K8s, allows carriers to deploy in a shared architecture and deliver the performance they need with automatic scaling capabilities to respond to network events such as attacks and peak load needs. This platform is part of the Secure64 ecosystem and augments the existing capabilities of Secure64 solutions to provide a secure, stable, and safety-focused customer-centric experience.

About Secure64
Secure64 brings trust to the internet through its suite of purpose-built, secure, carrier-grade DNS, network security, DDoS mitigation and reporting products. The company was built on a foundation of security, stability and safety and has forged solutions that are self-protecting and not only immune to malware but provide active protection for subscribers against Malware and phishing attacks. Secure64 secures the DNS infrastructures of leading service providers, government agencies and enterprises globally.

Our DNS supports a worldwide subscriber base of over 1 billion, representing over 20% of global mobile subscribers. Performing billions of DNS lookups every day across six continents, Secure64 lives up to its reputation for providing highly secure, safe, and stable DNS solutions.

Secure64 is a privately held company with deep technical and global experience in its leadership and technical staff. It is the only DNS solution provider that has authored a secure micro OS, the first to support IPV6 and built self-protecting DNS servers. For more information, visit http://www.secure64.com

Ian Sampson
Secure64 Software Corporation
Ian.Sampson@Secure64.com
http://www.secure64.com

Containers are a great idea. A small discrete element that allows a function to operate. They allow software developers to build and run these functions quickly. They contain all the elements needed to run the function within a pre-built package. They run knowing that the underlying architecture doesn’t need all the elements to run the code so that changes can quickly be made. According to recent research, the life of a container is often as small as 5 minutes. They are built at speed, deployed at speed and used at speed.

This is, however, one of the challenges of containers. They often reuse the core systems of the previously built container. That is to say, developers build upon and iterate the previous incarnation instead of building a new container. Any security vulnerabilities in the container and reused libraries/code are taken forward into the new container. It is not the developer’s fault, and this is just the way things happen.

We already saw attacks against containers with the Kiss-a-Dog attack last year.

DNS security is, therefore, a great place to prevent some of the resulting issues. Hackers use Command and Control infrastructures. As we all know, DNS is often used for an infected machine to get back to a control server. Hackers use techniques like fast flux and double fast flux to change where the C&C server is located quickly. This allows the hackers a more extraordinary ability to hide from detection.

Using a DNS blocking solution can help. Let’s be clear, it cannot stop inbound attacks, and it can’t protect the container from these attacks. It can, however, help stop an infected container from going to the C&C infrastructure. This is important. Often containers do not have limits on CPU and other core functions. By blocking the look-up at the DNS level for the infected machine, you prevent the infected container from using all its CPU and allowing it to carry out its core intended mission, not the mission the hacker wants it to do.

DNS security should be installed to help protect containers without the burden of applying local security elements to the container. This doesn’t limit the performance of the container and is a simple matter of using the DNS service that’s required anyway in the network.

So what are the benefits of a Secure64 Guard platform specifically for Container security?

1. Speed. You know the container will have security irrespective of the elements in the container
2. Performance. You are not hampering the performance of the container with unnecessary code
3. Reusability. The same DNS architecture is reused for every container deployed.
4. Visibility. Using the Vizion platform, you can see the calls to a Command and Control infrastructure that an infect container is making. You can then take proactive action to stop this from happening again.

If you would like to learn more about the Guard platforms, Vizion and our other services, please don’t hesitate to contact Secure64.